Bipolar transistors are formed in a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit for applications where bipolar transistors outperform metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) transistors. For example heterojunction bipolar transistors have higher transconductance, higher output impedance and faster switching speed. When building bipolar transistors using a CMOS integrated circuit manufacturing flow, it is difficult to form high performance heterojunction bipolar transistors with desired values of bipolar transistor gain (hfe) and high frequency (fmax) without incurring significant additional processing cost and complexity